There is perhaps no subject of human interest more entitled to an anxious and solemn curiosity, than the sentiments of a man of powerful and fully furnished mind in the immediate prospect of death. The coming change is so total and so tremendous, alarm and a sense of the unknown are so natural, that to find unpresuming confidence, and virtuous constancy of heart, in that awful time, cheers human nature. William Scott, always distinguished for great capacity and remarkable acquirements, about this period being seized with an illness, which he thought mortal, writes these memoranda on the verge of the grave:-- My great comfort is, to write on to my dearest Jack, and about my wife. Act for me. _Wife, child_. She knows I recommend her to your care. Object of my life, to make my sisters easy. Save ------ from ruin if we can. Protect my memory by your kindness. Life ebbs very fast with me. My dying thoughts are all kindness and fraternal love about you. While sensation remains, I think on my dearest brother, with whom I have spent my life. I die with the same sentiments. As the hand of death approaches, it is a consolation to think of him. Oh, cherish my wife! If you loved me, be a brother to her. You will have trouble about my affairs; you will not grudge it. Oh, take care of _her_! I leave you that duty. It is the last relief of my failing mind. Cherish my memory. Keep ----- from ruin, if you can, by any application of any part of my child's fortune that is reasonable. Once more, farewell! God bless you. These are affecting testimonials, and show singular tenderness of heart and truth of attachment; for they were written, to be transmitted only in case of death. Those who in after times saw Lord Stowell on the bench, the solemn, and even the stern depository of justice, could scarcely imagine, in that searching glance and compressed lip, the softness of heart which those fragments indicate. Death may be a great subduer of the fierce spirit of man as it approaches; but their language is not the phrase of puling softness, or pusillanimous alarm; it is at once calm and fond, collected and fervid. The writer's natural and honourable feelings are all alive at the moment when the last pang might seem to be at hand; and though nothing is said of his Christian hopes, (probably because the care of his family demanded more urgent consideration than his personal conceptions,) language like theirs could scarcely have come but from a Christian. His disorder was a violent bilious fever, which exhausted him so much that his recovery was slow. But to those who are in the habit of consigning their friends to "inevitable death" on every infliction of disease, it may excite some useful doubt of their own infallibility, to know that this dying man, then thirty-eight, survived for half a century, dying in his ninety-first year.